How much can you learn from Paul Pogba’s nine-minute cameo? Perhaps just that he does indeed exist and not only in columns, fitness updates and social media posts. That is where he has existed for the past 26 months, since his final game for Juventus in September 2023: equally at the centre of our gaze and absent from it.
Between his four-year doping ban, reduced to 18 months on appeal, his release from Juventus, and the extortion and kidnapping case that led to his brother being sentenced to three years in prison, his name has been constantly uttered but his face has been rarely seen – at least not on a football pitch.
His appearance at Roazhon Park on Saturday night was primarily an act of demythification, a moment when he escaped the realm of the collective imagination to become mortal once more. It was also a moment when the angel beat the devil. “In my head, there was sometimes an angel that said: ‘You’ll come back,’ and a demon that said: ‘It’s over,’ but my wife pushed me and I stayed focused. I wanted my kids to see me on the pitch,” said Pogba in July, upon signing a two-year deal at Monaco.
But his arrival at Monaco was not an endpoint in itself.
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